On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 3:56 PM, Fred Bauder <[email protected]> wrote: > http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125899/ > > January 7, 2011 > Wikipedia Comes of Age > By Casper Grathwohl > > Casper Grathwohl is vice president and publisher of digital and reference > content for Oxford University Press.
I was particularly struck by > How is that happening? Take the case of a project undertaken by the academic > music community. In 2006 a large group of musicologists began discussing, on > an academic listserv, their students' use of Wikipedia. One scholar issued a > challenge: Wikipedia is where students are starting research, whether we like > it or not, so we need to improve its music entries. That call to arms > resonated, and music scholars worked hard to improve the quality of Wikipedia > entries and make sure that bibliographies and citations pointed to the most > reliable resources. As a result, Oxford University Press experienced a > tenfold increase in Wikipedia-referred traffic on its music-research site > Grove Music Online. Research that began on Wikipedia led to (the more > advanced and peer-validated) Grove Music, for researchers who were going on > to do in-depth scholarly work. The rise in Grove traffic alerted me to the > music Wikipedia project, but I assume that other such projects that have > passed me by yielded similar positive results. They are far from the first group to notice such traffic advantages. It's kind of sad that group after group keeps rediscovering this - you would think that the SEOs wouldn't be the only ones to appreciate the value of Wikipedia linking them. -- gwern http://www.gwern.net _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
